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Is Headless WordPress Worth It? The Pros, Cons, and Hidden Costs

Headless WordPress is the wrong choice for most business websites. A well-cached traditional WordPress site already loads fast, and while headless does improve security, that's a bonus rather than a reason to rebuild. What you do get is a second codebase, a WordPress backend working as an API server, plugins that stop working, and an …Continue reading

Our WordPress Admin Took 13 Seconds a Page. Here’s the Audit.

A slow WordPress admin is usually blamed on plugin count, and plugin count is usually only part of it. On our own site the real chain was a six-process PHP-FPM pool on shared hosting, 2,800 daily wp-cron hits, 6,700 daily bot 404s, and two plugins waiting seven seconds on dead remote servers. A read-only WordPress …Continue reading

Should Your Website Block AI Bots? A Practical 2026 Answer

Blocking AI bots is the wrong question, because there are three kinds and they do different things. Search bots and agent bots send you traffic or citations, so allow them everywhere. Training bots give nothing back, so decide page by page: allow on marketing content you want AI to know about, block on anything you …Continue reading

WordPress White Screen After a Plugin Update: How to Fix It in 10 Minutes (and When Not To)

A white screen right after a plugin update is almost always that plugin throwing a PHP fatal error. The fix is to deactivate it without going through wp-admin (which you can't reach anyway): click the recovery mode link WordPress emailed you, or rename the plugin's folder over FTP. The site comes back. Then you decide …Continue reading

Testing in Agentic Coding: From Safety Net to Steering Wheel

Testing in agentic coding is no longer a safety net written after the code. Tests are now the specification, the constraint, and the steering wheel for the AI agent itself. Teams that define expected behavior as tests before the agent writes a line ship faster and break less. Teams that let the agent grade its …Continue reading

WordPress Plugin Security Starts as a Visibility Problem

WordPress plugin security is usually discussed as a code quality problem, but for most live sites it starts as a visibility problem. The information you would need to judge an estate exists in the database, in cron, and in public advisory feeds. It is just scattered across places no admin screen shows you. The argument …Continue reading

Agentic Coding Mistakes: Lessons From a Real App build

Agentic coding tools build the most conventional version of whatever you ask for. We asked for an invoicing system and got textbook accounting software, including a void feature that would have carried a GST liability on unpaid export invoices. Two diff-backed incidents from that build show why the fix is domain knowledge in the spec, …Continue reading

GitHub for FTP Users in the age of Agentic coding:

Version control is a system that records every change to your project so you can see what changed, when, and by whom, and roll back to any earlier state. If you have spent years dragging files into FileZilla, you already understand most of it: a repository is your project folder, a commit is a save …Continue reading

Building a WordPress MCP Server When the Spec Changed

MCP 2026-07-28 is the fifth revision of the Model Context Protocol, and it retires sessions and the initialize handshake in favor of plain request and response. That change suits WordPress unusually well. PHP already treats every request as an independent, shared-nothing process, so a WordPress MCP server no longer has to fake a persistent connection …Continue reading

Fluency Without Keystrokes: Web Developers in the AI Era

Will AI replace web developers? It will replace the part of the job that was always mechanical: translating a decided design into working syntax. It will not replace knowing what is being built, what it is built on, and why. I call that second skill fluency without keystrokes, and it is the one I have …Continue reading